Apple Pay enters Brazil: Introduces new sales opportunities

Apple Pay was finally unveiled in Brazil last week. The mobile payment and digital wallet service made its debut in Latin America through an exclusive partnership with Brazil’s top private lender, Itaú Unibanco Holding. Here’s a short analysis of the sales opportunities it brings to businesses interested in the Brazilian market.

Market Potential

Apple Pay’s arrival in Brazil springs from an exclusive partnership with the country’s biggest private lender, the bank Itaú Unibanco. The bank’s 1.2 million cardholders will now be able to set-up an Apple Pay account with their payment cards from Visa and Mastercard.

For now, only Itaú customers can benefit from the cutting-edge digital wallet. However, with just about 75 million Brazilian Mastercard or Visa cardholders, Apple Pay can only be expected to partner up with more banks in the future, in order to secure some of the huge market potential.

Several merchants are already prepared to accept payments made with Apple Pay, for examples international players such as Starbucks and TacoBell. The Itaú-Apple Pay partnership even secured discounts at some Brazilian merchants for purchases made with Apple Pay.

The Brazilian market offers some great opportunities for Apple Pay. According to Statista, roughly 153.8 million Brazilians own a mobile phone. Of these, 9.68% (or 14.89 million phones) have an IOS operating system. Though it’s not a very large share of the total population, it is still a lot of potential customers for Apple Pay.
Statista further predicts a quadrupling of the number mobile point of sale payments over the next four years, which can only be characterized as good news for Apple Pay.

Secure Payments to Brazil

Brazil is a country prone to fraud. In fact, as much as 49% of Brazilian card holders have experienced fraud. As a result, fraud prevention is a highly-sought-after feature in Brazil. This is more good news for Apple Pay because they offer Strong Customer Authentication, which is an effective fraud reducing mechanism.

Apple Pay is a secure payment method because it uses a tokenization system to provide a secure transfer of money. The user enters his card information at setup, and from then on he can complete payments using only fingerprint or face ID. The biometric identification makes Apple Pay both one of the fastest and one of the safest payment methods in the market today. Apple Pay can be used on all Apple devices with touch or face ID.

Apple Pay is already an established player across markets in North America, Asia, and Western Europe, and with their entrance into Brazil, they are now one step closer to being a global payment method. Clearhaus supports payments made with Apple Pay for Europe-based merchants.

Watch this video press release of Clearhaus’ launch of Apple Pay support to learn how Apple Pay works:

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